Q. What is the current offer?A. During this promotion, when you purchase an eligible VMware vSphere product offering you will qualify to receive a perpetual license of VMware Alive VM allowing you to manage up to 50 virtual machines and one (1) year of Basic Support and Subscription (SnS) at no additional charge.

Q. What is the timeframe for this promotion?A. When you purchase eligible products between November 23, 2010 and March 1, 2011, you will be qualified to receive a promotional code for our VMware online store which can be used to redeem the applicable VMware Alive VM perpetual license. Redemptions must be made by April 30, 2011 at midnight PST.

Q. What is the benefit of VMware Alive VMA. VMware Alive VM is a uniquely designed product that enables the VM administrator to have a comprehensive view of the overall performance of their complete vSphere environment.

Indicators of health, workload and capacity

Heat maps to easily locate trouble areas

Mapping of virtual machines to host to cluster and datacenter to get to root cause analysis

Trending and analytics for quick and effective problem solving

An Alive VM promotional redemption code will be emailed to eligible customers within 30 days of Alive VM General Availability or within 30 days after the eligible order is placed, whichever is later.

So officially the product has not yet been released. Notice the slight name change from the original Integrien brand. But the promotion is valid.

Sophisticated Dynamic Thresholding algorithms to learn the normal behavior of all time-series performance metrics captured by vCenter for all virtual elements.

Real-time calculation of Health for each virtual element, driven by an algorithm which assesses the underlying metric normal/abnormal behavior.

Real-time calculation of a Workload level for each virtual element, driven by an algorithm which assesses the resource-limited performance metrics.

Real-time calculation of a Capacity index for each virtual element, driven by an algorithm which projects the element’s future Workload demands

Compelling Visualizations

Visualize the performance of the entire virtual infrastructure from all vCenters, not just one, complete with element relationships that tie ESXs to VMs, VMs to LUNs, etc.

Dashboard focus can be switched from Health to Workload to Capacity analysis; or switch from an overview of the entire environment to detailed performance information about any element with one or two mouse clicks.

Within minutes of installation, AliveVM’s analytics start determining the range of normal behavior for every element, so you can focus on truly anomalous behaviors that requires attention before they develop into problems that affect end users.

An element detail view graphically displays the Health, Workload and Capacity not only of the element themselves, but also of parent and siblings. Related storage and network devices are also shown so you understand the behavior of the element in context

Automatically highlights an element’s most actionable metrics, those with the most abnormal behavior in the recent past

View ‘mash-ups’ of health performance with related change events. This makes the impact that each change in the environment had on the element’s health obvious. For example, if a configuration change degraded the health of a particular VM, you would quickly see that on the chart, and know which change triggered the performance problem.

Architecture

Available via download as either a quick and easy server installation package or a virtual appliance; as a web application there is no client installation necessary.

Collects all available time-series performance data, topology relationships, and vCenter configuration change events directly from vCenter. Requires only knowledge of the vCenter URL and a read-only user credential for each target vCenter to configure.

Install and integrate with your vCenters in minutes - no external RDBMS required, no manual configuration and no required user input.

Inherits the flexibility, reliability and scalability of the Integrien Alive enterprise platform for performance management.

2010-11-18

That is the title of the promotion valid for less than one month from today.

START PROMOTION

For a limited time, you can get VMware vCenter CapacityIQ and/or VMware View for free, depending on which version of VMware vSphere you upgrade to or purchase, making the ROI better than ever.

If buy vSphere Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise or Enterprise Plus, upgrade to any of these editions, or purchase any vSphere acceleration kit that contains these editions between August 9, 2010 and December 15, 2010 and get 15 VMs of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a robust virtualization capacity planning solution that helps you utilize your datacenter and desktop capacity in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Review the list of qualifying SKUs or read the FAQs for more details.

Buy or upgrade to vSphere Enterprise Plus between August 9, 2010 and December 15, 2010 when you purchase or upgrade to vSphere Enterprise Plus and get 50 free licenses of View Premier Add-On plus 15 VMs of vCenter Capacity IQ. Review the list of qualifying SKUs or read the FAQs for more details.

Q. View Premier 4.5 add-on is limited to orders of vSphere Enterprise Plus, upgrades to vSphere Enterprise Plus, and upgrades to Enterprise Plus Acceleration Kits. Is there a detailed SKU list posted?A. Yes. Please refer to complete list of SKUs. <-There is a long list so please check

Q. If I buy through a channel partner, will my orders be eligible?A. Orders placed through VMware resellers are eligible for this promotion. This promotion is not available for OEM partners ordering directly from VMware, except orders via Enterprise License Agreements or purchase orders where customer’s information is specified.

Q. This promotion has a maximum of 3 eligible orders per customer. Can you define customer in this case?A. For the purposes of this promotion, “customer” is defined as an entity that has a unique customer name. For example, if there are 4 orders from a customer with the same name (regardless of the address), only 3 of the 4 orders will receive the View and/or CapacityIQ bundles.

Redemption:

Q. How will the license keys be provided?A. You will receive a promotion code on or before December 15th, 2010, which is redeemable for the license key at the vmware.com online store. Promotion codes must be redeemed by February 15, 2011.

Q. Who will be the recipient of the email with the promo code?A. The promotional email will generally be sent to the person listed as the company contact listed on your VMware order.

Q. What do I do if I lose my promo code?A. Please send a customer service request and include your VMware Order ID. We will resend the promo code that was issued to you.

Q. What happens if I don’t redeem my code before it expires on February 15, 2011?A. The promo codes are only good for a limited time. If you do not redeem the code prior to its expiration, we will not be able to issue you a new code.

Q. Can I get temporary keys for this promotion offering today?A. No. CapacityIQ 1.5 licenses will be fulfilled within 30 days of general availability or within 30 days of when you place the order, whichever comes later. The VMware View Premier 4.5 bundle will be fulfilled within 30 days of general availability or within 30 days of placing the order, whichever comes later.

Support:

Q. What Support and Subscription (SnS) is included as part of the CapacityIQ 1.5 and View Premier 4.5 add-On Bundles?A. When you redeem the promotion code for the View and/or CapacityIQ bundles, you will automatically receive one year of VMware Production Support at no charge.

Q. When will the Support and Subscription (SnS) start on this View or CapacityIQ bundle? What happens after the first year?A. Your SnS agreement will begin on the day you redeem the promo code and will end one year from that date. Approximately 90 days from the expiration of the agreement, you will receive a quote to renew at then-current list prices.

Q. Once I redeem the promo code and install the license keys, how do I receive support?A. When you redeem the promo code, a one-year support agreement will be created. The Primary License Administrator can add additional Support Administrators to the agreement via the Contract Management portal.

Q. Who can I contact if I have questions?A. Please contact your VMware authorized reselling partner or VMware account representative if you have any questions.

If passwords of more than eight characters are set for ESXi 4.1 system users, the set password is truncated to eight characters, and the system evaluates only the first 8 characters of the password submitted for authentication. Note: To implement this fix, reset the password of the existing ESXi 4.1 system users after applying the patch.

2010-11-03

I was contacted the other day with an issue where someone was trying to create a cluster in a box, and they were running into an issue. When trying to power on the VM with the shared, eager-zeroed-thick disk that was created they were running into an error message, saying that they did not have permission to access the disk.

I checked to see if the VM settings were correct and that the SCSI adapter was set to a different controller with the correct disk sharing options. It was.

I enquired how was the eager zeroed disk created, and that was also done correctly. The admin logged into the ESX host and created the disk with the following command on the datastore.

I logged into the host and noticed something weird. The disk was created in a folder called shared but the permissions on the folder and the files were not correct. they were set with owner:group which was not root:root the way it should have been.

I then asked the storage admin to please check the export on the NetApp filer was defined and got this back

/vol/DBM/DBM_QT -sec=sys,rw

I remembered from a while back in my first VCP course that ESX hosts have to have root access to the NFS mount in order to work.

Changed the export to:

/vol/DBM/DBM_QT -sec=sys,rw,root=1.1.2.0/24:1.1.3.0/24

I now tested the creation of a new VM from the vSphere client and verified that the permissions were now created with root:root.

Strangely enough the ESX host was able to mount the datastore, machines were working as well.

I did however still have to change the permissions on the folders and files that were already created on this datastore while the mount was not correct. This I did in order to prevent further problems and rectify the incorrect permissions

2010-11-02

As was posted on the new KB article 1029925 the vSphere Client is no longer packaged with current builds of ESX and ESXi. However it is packaged with vCenter, so you can still get it from the web interface of your vCenter server.

Since they have posted a direct URL to the download I decided to wrap this in a PowerShell script Get-vSphereClient.